“SCEE can confirm that we are officially delaying the release of ICO/Shadow of the Colossus Collection and The Last Guardian from their respective launch timeframes of Spring 2011 and Holiday/Winter 2011. We will provide more information regarding release timing at a later date.”

Given the original launch windows, it’s possible that Ico and SotC may still make it before Christmas, but that looks unlikely for new title, The Last Guardian, which may now be pushed back to 2012.

Team Ico head Fumito Ueda posted an apology alongside the announcement:

“I announced at last year’s Tokyo Game Show that the release timing of The Last Guardian which is currently being developed would be holiday 2011.

“However, to provide more challenging and better quality of content to users and to fulfill First Party Studio’s obligations, I decided to postpone its release timing.

“All the members of my production team are working together at a fast pace to develop and release the game in First Party Studio quality.

“I sincerely apologize to all the customers who have been waiting for “The Last Guardian” for so long, but I beg for your patience. I will also announce the new release timing at a later time.”

If there’s a silver lining for those that are disappointed by this news, it’s that moving The Last Guardian out of the busy Christmas launch window may give it more room to shine and reduce the risk of it being overlooked. Then again, it might just mean it misses out on important ‘holiday season’ sales.

Back in February IdeaSpark co-founder Trent Oster stated that “MDK 2 for WiiWare has entered the final stages of the certification process.” Little had been heard in the last couple of months but now a release date has been put up on the game’s WiiWare page.

MDK2 was originally released back in 2000 for PC and Dreamcast, with a PS2 port appearing a year later. The game was renowned for its punishing difficulty – which Oster stated was undergoing “some tuning” for the WiiWare remake – as well as for its ambiguous title, MDK. Clues from the original MDK and its sequel pointed to a full title of either: Murder, Death, Kill or Mission: Deliver Kindness.

Take your pick.

A HD remake of MDK2 for PC is also in development by IdeaSpark Labs, though no launch date has been announced.

]]>http://www.vg247.com/2011/04/20/mdk2-landing-may-9-on-wiiware/feed/3Star Fox 64 3DS landing July 14http://www.vg247.com/2011/04/13/star-fox-64-3ds-landing-july-14/
http://www.vg247.com/2011/04/13/star-fox-64-3ds-landing-july-14/#commentsWed, 13 Apr 2011 09:43:46 +0000http://www.vg247.com/?p=163561After Ocarina of Time 3DS was given a firm release date yesterday, it’s now been announced that the 3D remake of Star Fox 64 will follow barely a month later. A veritable summer of fun, to be sure.

The official Star Fox 64 3DS website is carrying a short teaser clip of Fox, Slippy and co. dashing down a very long empty corridor before jumping into their ships and blasting off.

More excitingly, the site is emblazoned with the launch date: 2011.7.14 – though there’s currently no mention of which region this applies to.

Destructoid pondered the significance of the game’s absence from Nintendo’s second-quarter US lineup, speculating that this could point to a Japan-only launch on July 14, or that it could just be because Nintendo is planning a bigger reveal at a later date.

Sad to say, time has not been kind to many old-school original Xbox titles. Once on the very bleeding edge of graphical fidelity, they’re now more likely to make your eyes bleed than anything else. But hey, that’s what HD remakes are for, right?

Wrong, says Microsoft.

“We obviously have a lot of new things going on, so the thought of re-doing a bunch of things is probably difficult to just weave into the overall portfolio. If you can provide real value to the customer, there could be possibilities for that, but I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it,” Microsoft corporate VP Phil Spencer told IGN.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad idea,” he said. “I’m going to think about it from the customer’s perspective, and are we really delivering something of value to the customer at a price that they want?”

HD remakes, of course, have been all the rage of late, with the likes of Sony and Ubisoft especially embracing the trend. Microsoft, on the other hand, seems to have decided – at least, for the time being – to leave the past where it lies. Which, translated into the Common Tongue, means no HD version of Jet Set Radio Future for us. The world just became a sadder place.